Dell computers come with 32bit vista?

I dont know much on the subject, but I am told these 2 things:

1) Dell computers come with 32bit Vista
2) 32bit Vista supports only up to 3.25gb RAM, meaning that investing in 4 gb is a rather spectular waste of money

I have an inspiron 1520 in the build stage, and would like to know what the best way (if it's possible) of upgrading to 64bit is, as the dell customer service was laughably helpful.

 

1) Correct.
2) Mine goes up to 3.5GB so maybe I'm lucky. Whether it's a waste of money is up to each user, I paid the Dell premium and don't regret it as it was still under my budget and better specced than my 2nd choice. I do have 4GB and do plan to get x64 Vista Ultimate. There are guides on this forum that guide you step by step on a clean x64 Vista installation although it's not recommended for all because of x64 driver support and application incompatibility (mostly games).

 

Actually, i have a friend who called dell requesting to have the 64 bit Ultimate installed (it was not an option on the website). i believe they made him pay extra (not much), but he did get the 64-bit. But, be slightly weary, SOME drivers are not x64 capable (but i dont think you should worry with that vostro because they whould be totally able drivered for x64) and some games/apps dont run perfectally (but that amount is decreasing every day)

i am getting x64 ultimate, if that makes any difference to you.

 

dell doesnt like to ship 64 bit same with other companies because of incompatabilities.

 

Dell will only ship 64 bit ultimate within 30 days of purchase after that good luck getting them to ship you a 64 bit disc.

 

Im running it and its not an issue and i got no help from dell, the only issue i have is that it's got the Vista interface(folder settings and where to find all the options that im use to from XP). Hardware works the same as in 32bit maybe better but that may not be saying much.

Short version, If you have Vista64, Use it.

 

you have to remember 95% of the world thinks office is part of xp because both are microsoft. anything that makes something more confusing for a customer they try to avoid

 

3.5GB is the standard amount on Santa Rosa I believe...

I haven't had a single application (game or otherwise) incompatibility with Vista x64 Ultimate and I've installed almost every game popular from the last 5 - 7 years. Your applications will run fine in x64 as long as they work fine in Vista IMHO.

Ok well I did have one application incompatibility... The 16bit version of HJSplit I downloaded to see what the error message looked like

 

Man i use that program, just not yet on x64. lol add me to that list of incompatibility. DOH

 

ugh, they'll actually do it? I just spent like 45 minutes dancing from department to department with Dell's phone customer service and it was clear that no one I talked to actually knew what they were saying so I hung up. Guess I'll just be insistent.

Any advice on getting straight to who I need to talk to so I dont have to waste my time?

 

HJSplit?

It works perfectly fine on Vista x64 as long as you download the 32bit version. I use it a lot . They publish 16bit version I guess for legacy purposes dunno... I just nabbed the 16bit one to see the error Vista generates for 16bit stuff

But HJSplit works perfectly on Vista x64

 

Is upgrading to 64bit... I guess I'm wondering how it affects my purchase of home premium.

 

You got a link to that guide mate? Just cos when I tried installing Vista Ultimate 64-bit on my M1330 it just blue screened during start up and wouldn't stop until i held the power button!

 

Download the Intel SATA AHCI Controller driver from http://support.us.dell.com/support/...eid=R165149&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=222230. Save the files to a USB drive or burn them to a CD. During Windows Vista setup, manually load this disk driver at the disk partitioning screen. This will eliminate your blue screen.

 

same... i had zero luck getting Vista 64bit from Dell. I talked to sales and customer service... Maybe i'll give my XPS rep a call to see what he can do.

 

Searching the forums yielded the result: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=189675&highlight=Vista+reformat

Give it a go, good luck. I've never reformatted before so hopefully the instructions given in the thread are clear enough.

 

"What these folks are forgetting that the memory limitations of windows 32 bit is calculating video ram as well as system ram. Since your laptop doesn't have a dedicated video card, that extra ram will be allocated to it. It'll be fine, stop the rigamarole and move on already, you've wasted too much time on this issue."

I was told this at another messageboard..... true? It it not something I have to worry about?

 

anyone able to confirm?

 

Anyone able to confirm... please? I find this site to be a more trustworthy source of info.

 

Actually the thing is all OS need to address memory using the address space which is limited by the number of bits used for the address.... All of the system memory, registers, graphics memory and many other memory areas for various I/O devices need to use this address space.... But among these usually the one occupying the most will be the system memory.... The next will be the graphics memory..... The rest all are usually less....

A 32-bit OS's address space capability is limited to 32-bits even if the processor supports 64-bit.... So what happens is the address space is allocated to all these other devices, the graphics memory and finally the system memory.... Accessing 4 GB of RAM completely requires all the 32-bits and hence some amount is lost while accessed using a 32-bit OS (due to the address space allocated to other devices)..... So you would get something around 3.2 GB to 3.5 GB

Now if you have a dedicated graphics memory - then you need to access 4 GB RAM + 128/256 MB Graphics memory but for integrated solutions the graphics memory is taken from the main memory thereby for those with integrated graphics and 4 GB RAM they would be having more amount of system memory.....

 

I can neither confirm nor deny because I'm not entirely certain what the tortured grammar is trying to say.

The point seems to be that integrated graphics will cause you to "lose" less of your 4 GiB than discrete graphics. This is broadly correct, because the video RAM on your graphics adapter is one of the elements that "consumes" your physical memory and makes it inaccessible to Windows. A discrete graphics card with 256 MiB of video RAM will "hide" more of your system RAM than an IGP that uses only 64 MiB.

Out of curiosity - anyone with a current Santa Rosa laptop with discrete graphics care to run System Information and post the memory range consumed by the graphics adapter? (I'll be happy to explain how to find this information via private message, if you like.)

 

How's this: FD000000-FDFFFFFF, E0000000-EFFFFFFF, FA000000-FBFFFFFF, 000A0000-000BFFFF.

No idea what any of it means, but maybe this is what you were looking for?

 

The first one corresponds to 16 MB, then 256 MB, then 32 MB and the last one only comes to 128 kb....

Were these taken from the discrete graphics card you have on your Vostro ?

 

Looked up Device Manager: Graphics card: 8600GT: Resources. Yes this is from the discrete card as per my signature.

 

I believe the second range is the one used by the graphics card memory.... The others (around 48 MB) might be related to some other registers used by the gfx card....

 

They're memory ranges, in hexadecimal. Your discrete graphics and my X3100 (XPS M1330) both show 000A0000 - 000BFFFF and E0000000 - EFFFFFFF, so we'll ignore those. But where yours shows FA000000 - FBFFFFFF (32 MiB, as Ash says) and FD000000 - FDFFFFFF (16 MiB), mine shows only FEA00000 - FEAFFFFF (1 MiB). So that's a surprisingly small 47 MiB difference.

My X3100 is using 128 MiB of "system" (BIOS-reserved) memory, yet still has that 256 MiB E0000000 - EFFFFFFF range allocated. This makes me wonder if perhaps the Santa Rosa chipset just sets aside 256 MiB of address space for graphics in any circumstance. It also makes me wonder what the memory ranges would look like for a graphics card with more than 256 MiB. Anyone got Santa Rosa in a desktop?